My new word of the day!

But to explain how I got to that word I have explain a little bit. In the office that I’m working in this week (it changes depending on who is in and who isn’t–whatever empty desk there is) and in this office there is a painting by Salvador Dali called “La Tentation De St. Antoine” or The Temptation of St. Antony which looks like this:

click to expand

As well as “El gran masturbador” (which sounds perverted…):

And it got me thinking of one of Dali’s most famous paitings “La persistencia de la memoria” (1931) or The Persistence of Memory,

And that painting looks like this:

Which we happen to have requested (and received) a clock version of it for our wedding shower last summer in July.

I took a moment to look up and found this out about the painting (from wikipedia.org):

“History
The original idea of this painting came to Dalí on a hot summer’s day. He was at home with a headache while Gala was out shopping. After his meal he noticed some half eaten Camembert cheese and how runny it had become on account of the heat of the sunny day. That night, while he had been searching his soul for something to paint, he had a dream of clocks melting on a landscape. He went back to the unfinished painting he had been working on, which had a plain landscape with rocky cliffs in the background and a tree on a platform. Over two or three hours he added in the melting pocket watches which made this the iconic image it is today.

The painting was first exhibited in Paris at the Galerie Pierre Colle in 1931, where it was purchased by the New York gallerist Julien Levy for $250. In 1933 it was sold to Mrs. Stanley B. Resor, who donated the piece anonymously to the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1934.”

Also, on the timeline of paintings, this one happens to be the first one of a bunch that looked like this, so all the rest stemed from this one I guess. You know that very abstract look.

Anyway, while scrolling down the page I noticed a “See Also” option where there was a link to another page called Entropy, which according to wikipedia.org is:

“Entropy is the only quantity in the physical sciences that “picks” a particular direction for time, sometimes called an arrow of time. As one goes “forward” in time, the second law of thermodynamics says that the entropy of an isolated system can only increase or remain the same; it cannot decrease. Hence, from one perspective, entropy measurement is thought of as a kind of clock.

Now, I don’t know why it intregued me so much. Perhaps it was the talk of time, and how much I love time travel and that type of stuff and how it sounds like a cool name for a time travel movie. But this is my way of calling the shots. I’m putting it out there. This one is mine!

–Cos

PS Not to have Dali overshadow Picasso, but on the wall there is also a Picasso painting for Guernica:

But personally, I think I like the Dali ones much better. They are so weird!